The Challenge for Africa (26 page)

Finally, two full days after the election, on Sunday, December 30, the chair of the ECK dismissed from the room where he spoke all journalists except those from state-owned media, and announced that Mwai Kibaki had won the presidency by a margin of about 230,000 votes. Shortly after, Mr. Kibaki was sworn in for a second term at State House, the president's official residence. So hurried was the ceremony that, reportedly, those present forgot to sing the national anthem.

I had already digested the news of my own defeat at the polls two days before. I had sought reelection to my seat in parliament for Tetu. That fall, I had stood with others in the equivalent of a primary to determine who would be the official candidate of the PNU, which had formed relatively late in the run-up to the election. Many of us who lost suspected, however, that the primary election had been rigged. In the belief that the ECK would oversee a more fair and transparent process, and would prevent, for example, the bribing of voters, some of us decided to present ourselves to the voters again in the December general election, to be held shortly after the primary.

In my case, I ran under the banner of the Mazingira Green Party, which I'd helped found in Kenya in the early 1990s
(mazingira
means “environment” in Kiswahili). The reasons for the launching of Mazingira were to promote “green” values and greater environmental consciousness and also to introduce the country to the concept of having a political party with an ideology. In Kenya, as in much of Africa, the political culture is one in which parties generally don't have specific ideologies, even though they have manifestos (party platforms). Some parties are nothing but vehicles for particular individuals to participate in elections. I felt it was important to stick with Mazingira rather than do what was customary—to switch parties
when politically expedient. Because of the lack of ideology governing most parties, changing parties is not generally considered an issue. However, as a Kikuyu, I was expected to follow the party of Mr. Kibaki, who was, along with being president, the leader of the Kikuyu micro-nation. Staying with the Mazingira Green Party was, therefore, viewed as unforgivable by my constituents.

There were other reasons why I was punished at the polls. Even though I felt I had served my constituents to the best of my ability, I had insisted that it would be dishonest for Mr. Kibaki not to honor the 2002 memorandum of understanding. Then, in 2005, when the constitution was put to a referendum, I again urged the president not to hold the vote. It seemed to me bad policy to impose a constitution on the people, and I thought that, far from uniting Kenyans, the referendum would split the country down the middle along ethnic lines. However, as far as the Kikuyus I represented in my constituency were concerned, it was important that the president, a favorite son, be supported, right or wrong.

Some of my constituents were also unhappy because, when the president named the new cabinet following the constitutional referendum, and I was reappointed as assistant minister for the environment and natural resources, a position I had held since 2003, I declined to take up the post. All the cabinet ministers who opposed the constitution during the referendum had been dismissed, and I had urged that the president talk with the opposition members rather than exile them from the government. It was obvious that they represented a large public voice, and they deserved to be listened to. I indicated that I would take up the position when such a dialogue had been undertaken, and warned that failure to do this would increase divisions in the country that were already getting wider. All of these breaches of trust, and what I considered faulty policies, were, in my opinion, driving the country toward a conflict.

In making these decisions I was seeking to promote both dialogue and good governance that would be inclusive and embrace the country's diversity. However, in doing so I disappointed my constituents, who would have preferred that I support the president no matter what justice required. My taking these positions was perceived to be undermining the micro-nation's prospects to retain the presidency. Several of my constituents told me point-blank that I should have supported the president notwithstanding the circumstances, and that they now considered me a traitor.

It is not that communities aren't capable of recognizing the effects of good or bad policies on the ground. However, the strong sense of trust that micro-nations have in their leaders often predominates. Communities may not have enough information to know that the person may be the wrong leader (that they may, indeed, be traveling in the wrong bus), and they may refuse to hear other perspectives that are critical of them. Such may have been the case in this instance.

As it turned out, my fears that the country had become polarized since the 2002 elections were proven right. In 2007 the voters of Kenya were genuinely divided. Perhaps the most tangible indication of how they had expressed themselves was that the number of MPs on the ODM party's side were many more than those on PNU's. (However, while the number of voters is, of course, a good indicator, the fact that an area had an MP did not necessarily mean that the constituency had a significant number of voters. During the previous regime a considerable amount of gerrymandering had been done in creating parliamentary constituencies, so that areas supporting Mr. Kibaki, for instance, had heavily populated constituencies with relatively few MPs.)

Not long after Mr. Kibaki's swearing-in on December 30, 2007, several electoral commissioners revealed their doubts about the accuracy of the presidential vote tally. In my own Tetu constituency, I had already written letters to the ECK indicating that I had reasons to suspect that irregularities had taken place.

For example, the forms that tallied the votes were meant to be signed by both the returning officer at the polling station and the agents (or representatives at the polling place) of the candidates. However, some of the forms that I saw were not signed; others I never received. It was also reported that on the day of the voting some representatives of the candidates, including my own, had been asked by the local ECK official to leave the polling room. Each candidate had two representatives (agents)—one to relieve the other if they had to use the bathroom or wanted to get a cup of tea. The ECK official should have ensured that one of the candidates' representatives was at the polling station at all times so that no irregularities with the ballot boxes could occur or suspicion of such irregularities could be raised. That both representatives had been sent away at the same time left the system open to abuse. Even though these problems concerned the parliamentary vote, it did not take much to persuade me that there might well have been malpractice with the votes for local councils and the presidency as well.

The apparent manipulation of votes began at the location where they were to be tallied. The first people who knew there were discrepancies were the returning officers, who informed leaders of the opposition and government parties of their concerns. These leaders began speaking out, and as the pressure and complaints continued, suspicion increased that votes were being misappropriated. Other accusations began to pile up. For instance, it was reported that in particular districts more votes
had been cast than there were eligible voters, and recorded local vote counts differed from those presented to the electoral commission.

In some polling stations it was said that kerosene and candles by which to count the votes had run out, and when poll workers returned the next morning to continue counting, they found that new votes had materialized overnight. The chairman of the ECK was under pressure to announce the results even before he was ready. Kenyans watched and listened in disbelief. Had the country's nascent democracy been dealt a huge setback? Had the electoral process been interfered with?

In the eyes of some politicians, the misfortune of the 2007 Kenyan election was not that irregularities occurred, but that they were discovered. This is an all-too-common feature of elections in Africa: one African president is even alleged to have asked his colleague how he could lose an election he had organized. Given this history, the challenged performance of the ECK and the hurried nature of the swearing-in ceremony, it is understandable that many people in Kenya began to wonder whether there was something to hide. This unease was only enhanced over the next few days as impartial observers both within Kenya and in the international community—including the head of the European Union observer mission—detailed serious voting irregularities. When, several days after he had declared the result, the chairman of the ECK was asked who he thought had won the presidency, he replied that he didn't know. (A commission that later looked into the irregularities of the voting came to the conclusion that it may never be known who legitimately won the 2007 presidential election.)

On that same Sunday in December, only hours after the presidential result was announced, Kenya plunged into a war with itself, and the country, long considered one of the most stable in Africa, experienced perhaps the greatest level of violence since the time of the Mau Mau uprising against British
rule fifty years before. Unfortunately, some citizens took their anger about the outcome of the presidential contest out on their neighbors—nearly all of whom were as poor and powerless as they. The police seemed ill-prepared to deal with the growing mayhem and even contributed to the death toll by firing live ammunition into crowds and engaging bands of young men in running battles through the streets. Tragically, some police were reported to be partisan and therefore unwilling to stop the killing and destruction if members of their own micro-nation were committing the crimes.

The attackers knew perfectly well that it was not their neighbors who were responsible for their anger and frustration, and that the only “crime” those neighbors may have committed was that they belonged to or voted for a different micro-nation or candidate—but that was enough for them to be assaulted. Some of the violence appeared preplanned. Reports circulated that some politicians not only were stirring up people along ethnic lines to attack their opponents, but were also paying young people to kill or burn down people's houses. It became clear that behind the agenda of gaining power, there was another one: to drive from the Rift Valley members of one micro-nation whom the attackers, from another micro-nation, considered “foreign settlers.”

Tragically, however, violence begets violence. No matter how orchestrated the protests may have been in the beginning, eventually the leaders lost control, and, as could have been anticipated, atrocity piled on atrocity—even to the extent that gangs of young men blockaded roads and demanded passengers in passing buses to show their identity card, which in listing a person's name also usually reveals his or her ethnic origin. Or passengers were required to speak their mother tongue, another way of determining their ethnicity. If they were from the “wrong group,” they were attacked and many were killed.
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It is estimated that between 1,200 and 1,500 people lost their
lives; many others were scarred and wounded by machetes or bows and arrows wielded against them. Over half a million people were forced to flee from their homes, some of which were looted or razed to the ground. Women were raped, and, in one terrible incident, as many as fifty people, mainly women and children, were burned to death when a church they had taken shelter in was set on fire.

While the violence may have been shocking, what came as no surprise to Kenyans—and, no doubt, other Africans—was that what emerged on the night of December 27, 2007, and plunged the country into turmoil for weeks reflected the challenges to genuine democracy that have plagued Africa ever since most of its nations achieved independence. As is almost always the case, it was the innocent who suffered from the vanity and obstinacy of their leaders. Many people paid the ultimate price for their leaders' refusal to consider dialogue and mediation. In such conflicts, the African peoples always lose. From Liberia and the Ivory Coast in the west to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda in the heart of Africa, to Sudan and Somalia, two of Kenya's neighbors, it is women, children, and the poor who have been the main victims of leaders' or would-be leaders' stubbornness, corruption, and divisiveness.

The impression of a lawless and ungovernable Africa is, undoubtedly, what the outside world has come to expect from the continent. What is rarely reported on in the global media are the many individuals who look beyond their own communities to embrace their fellow citizens. Stories usually do not focus on civil society groups who are promoting conflict resolution rather than ethnic chauvinism, or employing dialogue rather than the machete or the gun as a way of sorting out grievances.
(It is also hard to determine in news reports which actions have nothing to do with the community someone belongs to but are either the basest forms of thuggery and extortion or a desperate reaction to seemingly hopeless poverty—the marginalization many people experience when it appears that nobody cares about their thoughts or their lives.)

Indeed, notwithstanding the risks, during the strife after the 2007 elections, groups of men and women from different micro-nations throughout Kenya, in some of the poorest as well as richest neighborhoods, came together to call for peace. Religious leaders, businesspeople, editorial writers, bloggers, and ordinary citizens spoke out against violence and voiced their hope that politicians would begin serious discussions to end the conflict for the good of the country and the region.
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Echoing former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, whom the African Union appointed to mediate the electoral dispute, the Green Belt Movement repeatedly called for a power-sharing arrangement between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga that would be ratified by parliament and placed within the constitution so it could not be easily dismissed—as the memorandum of understanding had been after the 2002 elections. On the grounds of the GBM headquarters in Nairobi, we erected a “peace tent,” where concerned individuals as well as victims of the violence could come to convey their sorrow for those who had died or been displaced and express their hopes for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
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